Most people that I know who have a problem with Gay Marriage are not very concerned about what type of unions are legally recognized by the state or what benefits such unions have. Rather, the problem lies in the redefinition of the term "Marriage," which has had a well-understood meaning for a very long time.
Tabbed emails take nothing away from folks who don't want to use that functionality
Understand that I'm not talking about tabbed browsing, but your comparison to Gay Marriage, and compare that statement to this: "Using the term 'Free Software' in new ways takes nothing away from folks who want to use it to refer to its more traditional meaning." Well, not really.
but there's a certain type of person who can't see beyond...
Your characterization of Gay Marriage detractors is something of a strawman.
I think most won't go to the bother and will just publish their code.
The is one of the great flaws in the thinking of many GPL advocates. If the license doesn't allow developers to do what they want then they will choose a solution with another license or else code a solution in-house. Making the GPL more demanding is not going to drive more developers to, reluctantly, use the GPL.
After all, how many trade secrets are going to be in your average php/asp page anyway.
we have conditioned urselves to accomodate the machine's internal architecture, to some extent. Its lowest value is a bit, so we then to think at that level. [If] its lowest value was a tri-state, we'd think differently, and our programs would probably run better and faster.
I'm an embedded programmer, so I have some experience here. If I check a bit and it isn't OFF then I may be certain that it is, in fact, ON. There is absolutely no programming error in "if (boolean) then On() else Off()".
Failure to initialize a variable is a programming error. I don't think that the best place to look for a programming error is a runtime check. I certainly don't think it's "better and faster" that way. Without a doubt, it's not faster.
In any case, my (somewhat facetious) complaint had nothing to do with using a tri-stated variable when one is appropriate. To be sure, if you can't be certain about the initialized state of a variable then perhaps having an "uninitialized" value is appropriate. (I'm not sure how one can be certain that a truly uninitialized variable would actually evaluate to "uninitialized," seeing that its, presumably random, value might coincide with one of its valid states.) My complaint had to do with having a multi-state variable and calling it "Boolean." Doing so makes code harder to understand, not easier. Rather like having a float and calling it "int" to ease coding of some obscure function.
I've always thought that boolean values SHOULD have a 3rd state
No. Boolean, by definition, has only two states.
a LOT of programming errors that assume that anything that isn't FALSE is TRUE
That doesn't sound like a programming error to me. Any boolean value that is not false must, by definition, be true.
if (a !=FALSE) { do_stuff();// executes, even if a is not TRUE, a really stupid idea in some cases. }
If you actually believe that "if (boolean_value!=FALSE)" is an improvement in form over "if (boolean_value)" then there is no helping you. Why stop there? Why not "if ((boolean_value!=FALSE)!=FALSE)"? Or, "if (((boolean_value!=FALSE)!=FALSE)!=FALSE)"?
I know that Microsoft invented a boolean type that could (and frequently did) take on one of more than two values. That was stupid, too. If your value must communicate more than two states then stop calling it boolean. Use an integer or make an enumeration or something, but please stop the "boolean==TRUE" insanity!
I can't believe you put up with it as long as you did! His protracted blatherings are an excercise in setting up and knocking down strawmen. His reaction to even minor disagreements, ad hominem. When he can't ascend to the lofty heights of decent ad hominem, he resorts to merely name-calling. Frankly, I wouldn't have had the patience. What a waste of time! Back in the days of USENET, he would have been in my killfile. Thankfully, your posts were informative enough that I think, on balance, the thread was beneficial.
Like all trolls, the personal creed of IgnoramusMaximus is that no mere fact or debatable idea can possibly stand up to his own sociopolitical agenda. Anyone who disagrees is clearly an idiot. Can't you all see that!?! Orwell would be proud, or scared.
You [Dr. Blue] simply have absolutely no idea how public key cryptography works nor how it is supposed to be applied in the context of Trusted Computing.
Wow.
Having met the real person behind the "Dr. Blue" pseudonym, I can say with absolute confidence that he knows more about cryptography and cryptographic systems than either you or I, and quite possibly knows more about it than anyone else on this message board.
Perhaps you should study a little more (at least get a doctoral degree in a relevant field), publish some peer-reviewed papers on the subject, and come back when your name is attached to a citation in one of Donald Knuth's "Art of Computer Programming" volumes.
Two or three hundred years ago, you could read every book ever written.
I doubt it. "Of making many books there is no end," was written somewhat earlier than two or three hundred years ago. Apparently, Solomon thought there were too many books in the mid-900's, B.C.
I don't want to draw this thread too far off topic, but I must ask: How do you do your motion control?
I ask because I work for a motion control company, and for the benefit of those not knowledgable, simultaneous multi-axis motion is not for the faint of heart. We use custom hardware that includes a CPU and a rather capable FPGA to accomplish it. With that and several software trade secrets, we design, engineer, and program our own hardware.
I'm not saying it's impossible to do at home, but I've never considered it a hobbyist kind of thing to do. If you have, I'm impressed (and would indeed like to see pictures). If you've used some "off the shelf" motion control hardware, or else if you cheated on the simultaneous multi-access part then I'm considerably less impressed. Still a cool project, though.
On my Epson CX4600, I printed out a full page photo of my kids on plain paper and, after allowing some time for the ink to dry, soaked the sheet in the sink for half an hour.
When I removed the paper from the sink, the water was still clear and the photo still sharp and brilliant. I keep the crinkled sheet in my desk to show people who don't believe me.
I suppose the next test should be to leave it in direct sunlight for a couple of weeks, but I don't recall the Epson commercials saying anything about resistance to sunlight.
The fact that we even USE trees for paper is tragic. The things take decades to mature, and perfectly serviceable paper can be obtained from other plants that grow fast enough to be harvested ANNUALLY. No more clearcutting your nursery and waiting a decade or so. Land that's productive and harvested EVERY YEAR -- imagine that!
Like any industry, the choice of means is driven by economics. If the picture you paint -- faster/cheaper/just-as-good -- were true then you can bet the bank they would be doing it already. (Well, you didn't actually say "cheaper," but your language seemed to imply it.)
To be sure, there is a reason that the paper industry prefers wood. And although I don't know what that reason is, I doubt that it's because they have a vendetta against trees.
That's because on "liberal" shows, guests with opposing viewpoints aren't allowed in the forum at all, especially if the subject is a highly-charged one.
I did not say you were trying to deceive. That's only one definition of "Duplicitous."
I was, however, referring to your argument that you should be lawfully protected from burglary, not because it's wrong, but because it, "Supports your personal interests." But an unborn child should not be afforded protection from abortion because that is a matter of choice.
Hmmm... Now that I think about it further, I see that you may be saying that the fetus should not be protected from abortion because it serves your personal interests. Perhaps your line of thinking is not so duplicitous after all.
Making it legal didn't increase the abortion rate.
You're kidding, right? Can you point to any statistics that support this?
I don't see pro-life and pro-choice as opposites. Pro-choice and anti-choice are the opposites.
You betray your bias here in the same way as if you had claimed the proper opposites are "Pro-Life" and "Anti-Life." The most neutral I can think of off hand are "Pro-Abortion" and "Anti-Abortion" since that is what we are really talking about. Maybe we should split the difference: "Pro-Life/Pro-Choice" or "Anti-Choice/Anti-Life."
Also, the question of legality and of morality cannot be separated as you suggest, since legal is merely a codification of moral. (The reason that burglary is illegal is that we, on the whole, think that it is wrong, for example.)
I'm not sure what your point is, nor how your post responds to the parent.
The parent seems, to me, to be saying that we shouldn't be critisizing authors for their choice of license just because it doesn't square with our sensibilities. And you reply that an author could use the GPL and make money also by dual-licensing?
To begin, I'm not certain that Deutsche Bahn is not already paying the municipalities involved. Certainly nothing in the story or linked "articles" says that they are not. But that doesn't matter! If the cities and townships involved were concerned about it, they could most easily pass legislation to deal with it effectively since the company doing it is well known. They apparently haven't.
There is no reason to expect that Germany might not have similar laws.
There is also no reason to expect that they would. In fact, I expect that they don't, or this wouldn't be a story.
Are you seriously arguing that a German railway company, that is renting bikes this way in several major cities shouldn't be allowed to because your town has some ordinance that would disallow it?
Go back and re-read the analysis. If the current four county recount of just undervotes had been completed, yes, Bush would have won. This is true. But that's based on a technicality.
The full anaysis was that in 6 of 9 recount scenreos, including ALL scenereos where the "will of the voter" was the primary consideration, and ALL of the scenereos where over-votes were recounted as well as undercounts, Gore won.
"Who would have won if Al Gore had gotten manual counts he requested in four counties? Answer: George W. Bush."
"Who would have won if the U.S. Supreme Court had not stopped the hand recount of undervotes, which are ballots that registered no machine-readable vote for president? Answer: Bush, under three of four standards."
"Who would have won if all disputed ballots -- including those rejected by machines because they had more than one vote for president -- had been recounted by hand? Answer: Bush, under the two most widely used standards; Gore, under the two least used."
Incidentally, Gore never sought recounts of "overvotes," so the third scenario is mainly hypothetical. Conspiracy theories aside, Gore failed to sue for the type of recounting that even gave him a chance.
If you want to discuss the will of the voter then maybe you should mention the overwhelmingly conservative voters in the Florida panhandle, thousands of whom simply went home without voting at all when the major news outlets prematurely called Florida for Gore?
Slashdot Mirror
Most people that I know who have a problem with Gay Marriage are not very concerned about what type of unions are legally recognized by the state or what benefits such unions have. Rather, the problem lies in the redefinition of the term "Marriage," which has had a well-understood meaning for a very long time.
Tabbed emails take nothing away from folks who don't want to use that functionality
Understand that I'm not talking about tabbed browsing, but your comparison to Gay Marriage, and compare that statement to this: "Using the term 'Free Software' in new ways takes nothing away from folks who want to use it to refer to its more traditional meaning." Well, not really.
but there's a certain type of person who can't see beyond...
Your characterization of Gay Marriage detractors is something of a strawman.
Have I wandered far enough off topic?
The is one of the great flaws in the thinking of many GPL advocates. If the license doesn't allow developers to do what they want then they will choose a solution with another license or else code a solution in-house. Making the GPL more demanding is not going to drive more developers to, reluctantly, use the GPL. After all, how many trade secrets are going to be in your average php/asp page anyway.
In my experience, a lot.
I'm an embedded programmer, so I have some experience here. If I check a bit and it isn't OFF then I may be certain that it is, in fact, ON. There is absolutely no programming error in "if (boolean) then On() else Off()".
Failure to initialize a variable is a programming error. I don't think that the best place to look for a programming error is a runtime check. I certainly don't think it's "better and faster" that way. Without a doubt, it's not faster.
In any case, my (somewhat facetious) complaint had nothing to do with using a tri-stated variable when one is appropriate. To be sure, if you can't be certain about the initialized state of a variable then perhaps having an "uninitialized" value is appropriate. (I'm not sure how one can be certain that a truly uninitialized variable would actually evaluate to "uninitialized," seeing that its, presumably random, value might coincide with one of its valid states.) My complaint had to do with having a multi-state variable and calling it "Boolean." Doing so makes code harder to understand, not easier. Rather like having a float and calling it "int" to ease coding of some obscure function.
No. Boolean, by definition, has only two states.
a LOT of programming errors that assume that anything that isn't FALSE is TRUE
That doesn't sound like a programming error to me. Any boolean value that is not false must, by definition, be true.
if (a !=FALSE) { do_stuff(); // executes, even if a is not TRUE, a really stupid idea in some cases. }
If you actually believe that "if (boolean_value!=FALSE)" is an improvement in form over "if (boolean_value)" then there is no helping you. Why stop there? Why not "if ((boolean_value!=FALSE)!=FALSE)"? Or, "if (((boolean_value!=FALSE)!=FALSE)!=FALSE)"?
I know that Microsoft invented a boolean type that could (and frequently did) take on one of more than two values. That was stupid, too. If your value must communicate more than two states then stop calling it boolean. Use an integer or make an enumeration or something, but please stop the "boolean==TRUE" insanity!
Apparently, however, non-Microsoft alternatives have no decent spelling or grammar checkers.
Like all trolls, the personal creed of IgnoramusMaximus is that no mere fact or debatable idea can possibly stand up to his own sociopolitical agenda. Anyone who disagrees is clearly an idiot. Can't you all see that!?! Orwell would be proud, or scared.
Wow.
Having met the real person behind the "Dr. Blue" pseudonym, I can say with absolute confidence that he knows more about cryptography and cryptographic systems than either you or I, and quite possibly knows more about it than anyone else on this message board.
Perhaps you should study a little more (at least get a doctoral degree in a relevant field), publish some peer-reviewed papers on the subject, and come back when your name is attached to a citation in one of Donald Knuth's "Art of Computer Programming" volumes.
I doubt it. "Of making many books there is no end," was written somewhat earlier than two or three hundred years ago. Apparently, Solomon thought there were too many books in the mid-900's, B.C.
Perhaps you've gotten a little too into filmmaking? If you watch The Princess Bride for the cinematic details then I'm afraid you've missed the point.
I ask because I work for a motion control company, and for the benefit of those not knowledgable, simultaneous multi-axis motion is not for the faint of heart. We use custom hardware that includes a CPU and a rather capable FPGA to accomplish it. With that and several software trade secrets, we design, engineer, and program our own hardware.
I'm not saying it's impossible to do at home, but I've never considered it a hobbyist kind of thing to do. If you have, I'm impressed (and would indeed like to see pictures). If you've used some "off the shelf" motion control hardware, or else if you cheated on the simultaneous multi-access part then I'm considerably less impressed. Still a cool project, though.
On my Epson CX4600, I printed out a full page photo of my kids on plain paper and, after allowing some time for the ink to dry, soaked the sheet in the sink for half an hour.
When I removed the paper from the sink, the water was still clear and the photo still sharp and brilliant. I keep the crinkled sheet in my desk to show people who don't believe me.
I suppose the next test should be to leave it in direct sunlight for a couple of weeks, but I don't recall the Epson commercials saying anything about resistance to sunlight.
You are a horrible, horrible person! As punishment, I hope that other people with phone numbers similar to yours also do this.
Like any industry, the choice of means is driven by economics. If the picture you paint -- faster/cheaper/just-as-good -- were true then you can bet the bank they would be doing it already. (Well, you didn't actually say "cheaper," but your language seemed to imply it.)
To be sure, there is a reason that the paper industry prefers wood. And although I don't know what that reason is, I doubt that it's because they have a vendetta against trees.
Wow! This is fun.
That's because on "liberal" shows, guests with opposing viewpoints aren't allowed in the forum at all, especially if the subject is a highly-charged one.
See? I can make sweeping generalizations, too.
I was, however, referring to your argument that you should be lawfully protected from burglary, not because it's wrong, but because it, "Supports your personal interests." But an unborn child should not be afforded protection from abortion because that is a matter of choice.
Hmmm... Now that I think about it further, I see that you may be saying that the fetus should not be protected from abortion because it serves your personal interests. Perhaps your line of thinking is not so duplicitous after all.
You're kidding, right? Can you point to any statistics that support this?
I don't see pro-life and pro-choice as opposites. Pro-choice and anti-choice are the opposites.
You betray your bias here in the same way as if you had claimed the proper opposites are "Pro-Life" and "Anti-Life." The most neutral I can think of off hand are "Pro-Abortion" and "Anti-Abortion" since that is what we are really talking about. Maybe we should split the difference: "Pro-Life/Pro-Choice" or "Anti-Choice/Anti-Life."
Also, the question of legality and of morality cannot be separated as you suggest, since legal is merely a codification of moral. (The reason that burglary is illegal is that we, on the whole, think that it is wrong, for example.)
The parent seems, to me, to be saying that we shouldn't be critisizing authors for their choice of license just because it doesn't square with our sensibilities. And you reply that an author could use the GPL and make money also by dual-licensing?
NOTE TO SELF: Change bank passwords, or slashdot passwords.
To begin, I'm not certain that Deutsche Bahn is not already paying the municipalities involved. Certainly nothing in the story or linked "articles" says that they are not. But that doesn't matter! If the cities and townships involved were concerned about it, they could most easily pass legislation to deal with it effectively since the company doing it is well known. They apparently haven't.
There is no reason to expect that Germany might not have similar laws.
There is also no reason to expect that they would. In fact, I expect that they don't, or this wouldn't be a story.
So?
Are you seriously arguing that a German railway company, that is renting bikes this way in several major cities shouldn't be allowed to because your town has some ordinance that would disallow it?
Your statement lacks parity, inasmuch as abortion (in the clinical sense of "getting an abortion") is not an accident. Perhaps a better analogy:
"A child killed by a firing squad will NEVER become an adult. An aborted foetus will NEVER become a baby."
You're kidding, right? If every person in the entire country voted in a single precinct, int32 would be sufficient.
The full anaysis was that in 6 of 9 recount scenreos, including ALL scenereos where the "will of the voter" was the primary consideration, and ALL of the scenereos where over-votes were recounted as well as undercounts, Gore won.
How do you define "will of the voter"?
From Dave Kopel:
Incidentally, Gore never sought recounts of "overvotes," so the third scenario is mainly hypothetical. Conspiracy theories aside, Gore failed to sue for the type of recounting that even gave him a chance.If you want to discuss the will of the voter then maybe you should mention the overwhelmingly conservative voters in the Florida panhandle, thousands of whom simply went home without voting at all when the major news outlets prematurely called Florida for Gore?